Such control and monitoring devices are especially used with model racetracks, in particular so-called slot car tracks, but can in principle also be used on real racetracks and the racing vehicles that are driving on them. As racing vehicles various vehicle types, e.g. automobiles or motorcycles, naturally come into consideration, but in principal other race objects, such as for example horses, harness racing carriages or waterborne vehicles such as racing boats can be equipped or monitored and detected with corresponding devices, so that the term racing vehicle is to be broadly interpreted in the context of the present application.
Racing on racetracks is usually monitored with the assistance of technical recording means and controlled with corresponding control modules, which concerns e.g. the detection of the number of laps covered and/or the lap time or the identification of a respective vehicle or of a driver associated with said vehicle. In addition to the monitoring measures that have already been known for a long time, e.g. light barriers for the detection of speed, camera monitoring for the detection crossing of the finishing line or similar, in more recent times it has also been proposed to monitor or control vehicles and the drivers controlling them as well as the vehicle position on the racetrack and the time or distance travelled by electronic data transmission from the vehicle. For example, documents WO 2006/042235 A2 and US 2006/0183405 A1 propose fitting so-called RFID elements to the racing vehicles, i.e. identification components operating with radio data transmission, and to store in said RFID elements a vehicle identification, a driver identification and possibly other vehicle and driver data as well as race data, which are then read out by suitable RFID readers at the racetrack, e.g. so that for each passage through the finishing line the RFID element of a vehicle is read out, the number of laps is correspondingly increased and is stored together with the vehicle identification and the driver identification.
Said document WO 2006/042235 A2 proposes, in addition to said RFID readers, placing conductor loops or light projectors in the roadway in order to detect vehicles driving over them.
If cameras are used for the monitoring of a section of track, it is not easy to manage the resulting image flow and data flow during the recording and to select an image or the few images therefrom that are of interest and which actually show the respective event. For example, high-speed cameras are readily used for the monitoring of the starting process or the finish or another significant section of track, such as, for example, a split time line, a knoll or a steep curve, in order to be able to show the race event of interest in a time loop or to have an image available, which actually shows the racing vehicle just at the instant at which it is passing over the section of track of interest. For racing vehicles traveling at very high speed, with cameras that can only record a limited number of images per second it is clearly not possible in any way to shoot an image accurately at the time at which, for instance, the front of a vehicle is crossing the finishing line. On the down side, this means, however, that a plurality of images and data are produced that are not of interest. If said images are all recorded, a great deal of memory space is required and moreover the later evaluation of the images is made difficult, because large numbers of images and quantities of data have to be checked through or analyzed in order to select an image or the few images which actually show the event to be monitored.
A camera monitoring system for monitoring of the finish in track and field events is known from DE 103 36 447 A1, in which the finishing of a runner itself is detected by means of a light barrier and images of the runner are recorded using a camera while crossing the finishing line. The race number of a respective runner that has crossed the finishing line is subsequently determined using image recognition. Said monitoring system is, however, ultimately unsuitable for monitoring of racing vehicles or cannot cope with the associated race conditions, because as a result of the very much lower speed of runners when crossing the finishing line even with relatively few images per second an image is normally available that actually shows the crossing of the finishing line. Accordingly, processing can take place with very many fewer images to be stored. In order to reliably capture e.g. a crossing of the finishing line with an image for racing vehicles with very much higher speed, the camera, e.g. in the form of a high speed camera, must produce very many images per second, so that as a consequence a very much larger image and data flow is processed. The system mentioned according to DE 103 36 447 A1 is not capable of this.
Furthermore, U.S. Pat. No. 4,183,056 describes an image recording system for monitoring the impact of a tennis ball on or close to a boundary line, wherein the boundary line should be made pressure sensitive in order to detect the impact of the ball and to start the recording of the images permanently delivered by a camera. The recording is then stopped again after the expiry of a predetermined time interval. With this system, however, there is the problem that the recording interval is only set in train with the impact of the ball on the line itself, and thus no images can be recorded or provided, which also show the sequences immediately prior to an interesting event, i.e. no images can be shown that show this ball shortly before its impact. Furthermore, in the event of a signal from the pressure sensitive boundary line, a marker is supplied in the associated camera image and recorded therewith, so that during a subsequent playback the marker can be seen in the image and the time of the ball's impact can be indicated exactly. For image analysis or evaluation such an associated storage of a corresponding marker is, however, only conditionally adequate, because large quantities of data occur and relatively long search times arise for a corresponding image evaluation. In addition, said system is less suitable for monitoring racing vehicles, because for an automobile race or a motorcycle race those fractions of a second after the crossing of the finishing line are of less interest, but those fractions of a second prior to crossing the finishing line are of greater interest and are thus to be stored.